PoWBoT: The Telegram Bot That Checks Whether Bitcoin Spending in Africa Is Real
A volunteer with no coding background built a tool that checks videos of Bitcoin payments at African shops, pays everyone involved in sats, and puts the results in public view.
You have probably seen the video. Someone buys bread, airtime or a bag of rice and pays with Bitcoin. The post gets likes, and the caption says the circular economy is growing.
But is it real? Is it a shop that actually accepts Bitcoin, or a one-off made for the camera?
That is the question PoWBoT is built to answer. PoWBoT, is a Telegram-based system that checks videos of real Bitcoin purchases, rewards the people involved and keeps a public record.
What “proof of work” means here
This is not about mining. In PoWBoT, proof of work means evidence that someone used Bitcoin as money: a video of a customer paying a local merchant over Lightning, posted publicly with the hashtag #spedn.
The bot serves the Circular Bitcoin Africa Fund (CBAF), a network of about 40 grassroots projects in countries including Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Mozambique, Ghana, Zambia and Burundi. These projects work in townships and neighborhoods, teaching people and signing up merchants. The goal is spending, not just holding.
How PoWBoT works
- A project films a Bitcoin payment at a fixed-location shop and posts it on X or Nostr. The post must include the merchant’s Lightning address, a BTCMap.org link and #spedn.
- The project sends the post link to the Telegram bot.
- The bot runs automatic checks against the basic rules.
- A human reviewer watches the video and approves or rejects it.
- If approved, the bot sends sats over Lightning to the merchant, the project and the reviewer, then shares the post on Nostr.
The mix of software and a person is the point. The bot catches the obvious problems fast. The reviewer judges what software can’t.
Built by a volunteer, with AI help
Glenn Jooste (Bitcoin Ubuntu), a Bitcoin educator in South Africa with no programming experience, built PoWBoT. In December 2025, they asked an AI chatbot (Grok at first) for help writing a simple Telegram bot. Over the next weeks, with more help from Claude and a lot of persistence, it grew into a full verification and payment system.
It runs on Python and uses Blink for Lightning payments, Nostr tools to share posts, BTCMap and X data, and a public dashboard on GitHub Pages. It was developed with Bitcoin Ekasi and the wider CBAF effort, which takes inspiration from Bitcoin Beach in El Salvador.
The lesson is useful beyond this project. Open-source tools and AI now let people who are not programmers build real software for their own communities.
The numbers so far
Since December 2025, PoWBoT has approved more than 4,600 posts from nearly 30 projects at over 300 merchants. Approval rates on the public dashboard have often been around 96–98%.
Each round, called an epoch, has public standings by project and by country. Epoch 6 started in July 2026, with a push for more shops and towns and more everyday spending.
Why it matters
Adoption claims in Bitcoin are hard to trust, and circular economy projects have faced that doubt too. PoWBoT answers with evidence anyone can review: a video, a shop location on BTCMap and a public record.
Everyone gains from the setup. Merchants earn sats for accepting Bitcoin. Projects earn for showing real use. Reviewers earn for checking. That keeps all sides honest and tied to real places, from Kibera to Livingstone.
What it can’t do
PoWBoT is not perfect, and it doesn’t claim to be. It reduces the need to trust a post, but it doesn’t remove it. The system still depends on human reviewers, and these projects are small and local by design. A video proves one payment at one shop. It does not prove that a whole community is using Bitcoin.
Still, it is a practical test of what incentives, video evidence, Lightning payments and community review can do together, without a big development team.
Follow along
For the latest epoch stats, the project directory, merchant lists and guidelines, visit powbot.africa.